Implementing new technology can be a big headache for small businesses. But when female apparel brand Dang Chicks applied Brightpearl order management software, the small retailer was able to home in on its list segmentation and wrangle in abandoned shoppers.
Tim O’Connor, chief operating officer for Dang Chicks, says the nearly four-year-old retailer manages two different audiences: wholesale and direct. Before implementing Brightpearl’s software three months ago, Dang Chicks relied solely on e-commerce service Bigcommerce and couldn’t segment its audience beyond customer group. Hence, the mixing of audiences caused wholesale and direct customers to receive different price points for the same product set. In addition, Dang Chicks needed to find a solution that allowed the brand to open up supplementary branded store fronts and free up at least one full-time employee from managing the real-time inventory across multiple channels.
“It was very difficult to run everything out of a single cart: one for the wholesalers, one for direct,” O’Connor says. “We couldn’t bring on other marketplaces like Amazon or any other store fronts and have it draw out of the same inventory by just using Bigcommerce by itself.”
Since integrating Brightpearl with Bigcommerce, Dang Chicks has been able to treat the two customer groups as two separate carts across multiple storefronts and marketplaces. One way Dang Chicks has been able to target its customers specifically is through shopping cart abandonment emails. To win back customers who have gone astray, Dang Chicks sends out a series of three emails. The first email is sent out within two hours of abandonment and contains a 10% off coupon, the second email is sent within a day of abandonment and includes an offer for free shipping, and the third email is sent within two days of abandonment serves as a reminder but takes on an urgent tone.
Since segmenting its audiences, Dang Chicks has seen a 17% increase in direct sales through abandoned cart notifications and has experienced a 15.5% sale recovery rate.
However, O’Connor says abandonment notifications can be a “slippery slope” for marketers, particularly when it comes to deciding whether to include promotions in their email sequence.
“If I’m not going to convert them, the last thing I want to do is dilute the brand in their eyes,” O’Connor says. “If words gets out that Dang Chicks will give you a great discount [if you] just abandon your cart, that’s not the message we want to propagate.”
In addition, Dang Chicks is also working with ecommerce app platform Lexity to retarget its consumers. When a consumer leaves Dang Chick’s website, a cookie is attached to that consumer. Lexity then sets up banner ads or promotions to lure the consumer back to the cart. O’Connor says he has already seen a 10% increase in recovered page views since launching the retargeting initiative about two weeks ago.
